Archive for January 2008

Here is a blog post that you should go read. Allow yourself some time because it is very long and has all kinds of neat links, but it is far and away the best argument I have yet come across which explains why making technical improvements to cars, and decreasing their emissions, is not the solution to our problems. As someone once remarked to me, “If they were all ZEVs tomorrow, we would still have a hell of a problem!”

I suppose that means I must be doing something right. Which, for a retired boomer who seems to annoy the bejesus out of some people, is a comfort.

In the month of January the number of views grew by 40% – and the blog had its best day ever at 647 views.

Welcome all you lovely people who come here to read. And also thank you to the vast majority of supportive commenters. Yes, we do have a couple of trolls now but that is just par for the course for any on line discussion group. They are not going to take over the debate. If that means a return to comment moderation, I trust that you will understand. Please, do not feed the trolls.

Raul asked me how I find interesting things to write about. The problem I face is that there is so much out there, it is more about selection from a growing plethora than finding things. And anyway, if I told you how it was done, you might go off and do it for yourselves. I do, by the way, check on the pingbacks and referrers, and if you do have a blog I usually try to have a look around which often leads me to leave a comment too. So I hope that it all becomes mutually supportive – which does not mean we have to agree. Except on being polite.

Translink is going to buy 141 Nova hybrids for $81.5 m 32 are expansion buses, 109 are replacements and they will be allocated to Vancouver and Burnaby, displacing some older diesels to Surrey. This is because they work best in stop and go traffic: braking regenerates power which is stored in the battery. At a price of $580,000 per bus they are about $100,000 more than a straight diesel but cheaper than a roughly $1m trolleybus. Hybrids should be cheaper to operate than diesels as they use less fuel. The choice of hybrids came after extensive testing of other buses – so no more cng or hythane – good!

Well, the good news here is that the tunnel is not likely to be enlarged any time soon, but it does look like the Steveston Highway overpass will get looked at. And Richmond’s daft notion of a new interchange on #99 at Blundell has been replaced by a Highway 91 interchange at Nelson Road. This is for the port related development on the north bank of the South Arm.

And then the Minister talked about transit

Drawing applause from the crowd, Falcon reiterated his commitment to turnstiles at all rapid transit stations in the region. Turnstiles make people pay for transit they use and provide a sense of safety.

“You never want to underestimate the importance of that. Whether it be the Netherlands or in Paris or in London, there’s no question that commuters, particularly women, feel safer when they’re in a controlled environment, where not every single aggressive panhandler or nut that feels like wandering into a station can do so and harass the patrons.

“Believe it or not, criminals are not the smartest people in the world. They generally won’t pay three to five bucks to go into a station and harass people. That’s a good thing.”

So now its agressive panhandlers and nuts we worry about. Not fare evaders costing us revenue, notice. Which seems to me to be tacit acceptance that gates are not going to pay for themselves. He seems to have stopped talking about how he “knows” fare evasion is higher than Translink admits.

It is also probably significant that he is no longer talking about actual safety – as opposed to perceived safety. If I was Minister of Transport, I think what would grab my attention more is not how safe some people feel or don’t feel, but what the data tells us about injuries and deaths. I might also look at property damage and losses too. Because while that will probably not get me a standing ovation at a Richmond Chamber of Commerce breakfast, it might give me some ideas on what the best rate of return on an increment of $100m might buy me. I suspect that it would look like a road traffic law enforcement program. There is a very good letter about a recent four day crackdown by Richmond RCMP in the same paper edition that does not appear on line. 250 violations were ticketed – 123 were speeding, 10 for driving without a licence. The letter writer suggests that more than 4 days is needed.

And if “nuts and panhandlers” are a problem, spending $100m on housing for the homeless, and more care for those tipped out of institutions might make a lot more sense. Since those problems were largely created by provincial government cuts to essential social welfare programs. But of course to a BC Liberal a crack down on fare evasion or a campaign to keep beggars and homeless people off SkyTrain looks so much more attractive than wondering why we have those social problems in the first place.

This debate is kick started here by the BC government’s announcement – which might be summarised as trains for Vancouver, Coquitlam and part of North Surrey and buses for everywhere else, sooner but mostly later.

The same quarrel is raging in Ottawa – and I don’t mean the federal government but the city region. Or at least the bit of it in Ontario. The city fathers are accusing the rail advocates of jumping to conclusions. But the fact of the matter is Ottawa is the only city in Canada that adopted the “Curitiba” approach. And they spent a lot of money on a busway, but used ordinary buses instead of high floor ones, so that the routes could feed onto the busway with no change of vehicle required. This means that in a city whose peak period is mainly civil servants commuting to downtown, they got a comfortable one seat ride – no transfers – from near their front door to near their office.

But, as usual, the instincts to pinch pennies meant that they failed to do the downtown bit properly, so at the end of the busway, the buses have to fight traffic on street, with nothing like enough bus priority.

Even Calgary did downtown surface transit better than Ottawa! And now the argument turns on a tunnel! WRONG.

Why am I against tunnels in towns for transit? Because grade separation is nearly always to give cars free reign on the surface. Cars and urbanity are a problematic but not insoluable issue. But grade separation means that access to transit is harder than on the surface. Some European cities experimented with what they called “pre-metro” – they put the trams underground in the city centre as a first step to a complete metro system. And they quickly realised it was a mistake, for the space freed up by taking up the tram tracks was instantly filled by more car traffic. And what city centres need is more space to walk, and sit around in pleasant public spaces and watch the passing scene.

Surface for transit demonstrates commitment to people – not cars. Rail transit is more predictable – trams cannot leave their tracks, so you know where they are going to be – but you can also do various guided bus ways too. And as long as there is a commitment to transit priority – produced by a combination of regulations and hard engineering (like pop up traffic blockers) there is not much to choose between bus and rail until you get to very high passenger throughput. So called “intermediate capacity” systems pretty much wash out even with pluses and minuses on both sides.

Rail is better if you want to convince developers you are serious. Buses – even when you build a dedicated bus way – are easy to take away. Just ask Richmond. Oddly enough, underground railways do not attract development – at least that is what the developers told the London Docklands Development Corporation. “A staircase on the corner of the street leading down a hole gives me nothing to sell” said more than one. A rail station will have a much larger walk in area than a bus stop. People are prepared to walk further to get to a train than a bus. So on a greenfield – or a brownfield like the docklands – I would pick rail. But if you have a city with a busway already the reason you might switch to rail is capacity. In Toronto they used to have a rule of thumb. You increase bus service until you have them nose to tail, then you put in streetcars. Then when you have streetcars nose to tail you build a subway. Except of course it did not work out like that.

I think you need to start with what kind of city do you want. Think first of how it will work, and what it will look like to people living, working and relaxing there. Transportation is not an end in itself. It is way of doing everything else. And transportation by any mode starts and ends with a walk. So start your urban design work with walking – and see how to fit in other modes. Cities worked very well for thousands of years, long before cars, and long before buses and trams come to that. The qualities of urbanity can still be seen in the cities that have retained the structure of the pre-industrial age. And it is no surprise at all when we come to create new places, we tend to pick up on the cues that are common to all successful cities. And if you want to see what distopia looks like it is usually dominated by machines. No one wants to live inla ville radieuse.

But since we have machines, if anything goes underground it should be the utilities not the people. Trains overhead – the el – I find oppressive as a pedestrian – even if the view from the train is better. What London has rediscovered recently is that when your underground system is straining you can do a lot with buses – and bus lanes and bus only streets. Especially if you add road pricing to pay for them.

What is instructive about the debate in Ottawa is how sterile it is. It is an argument between transit enthusiasts – not a discussion about how to make Ottawa a better place. I think the debate here is at least a step or two forward, since we start with Livability as the criterion. Not mobility – which has turned out to be such a snare and a delusion. And yes that is hard for some to grasp – especially those who are only interested in making lots of money quickly, or defending their self interest. Or who see economic growth as a desirable end in itself – arguing it makes all other things possible when in fact what it does is shut off some of the best possibilities.

I have predicted here, more than once, that the US recession is going to be serious and long term. That argument is one I use to question the “need” for Gateway. In case you think this is merely me being a Jeremiah it is based on what economists call “fundamentals”. This article looks at recent economic history in the US and explains why the present measures to stave off recession do not address the current problems.

Robert Reich is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is former US secretary of labour and author of “Supercapitalism“

Most Americans are still not prospering in the high-technology, global economy that emerged three decades ago. Almost all the benefits of economic growth since then have gone to a small number of people at the very top.

The question for us of course is the extent to which the optimism of our governments that we are somehow insulated from these effects is justified. The real wage stagnation, increased working hours and labour participation rates as well as high personal borrowing rates are also seen here – though in somewhat more muted fashion. But mostly the US is still our biggest market. And our motor vehicle manufacturing sector is inextricably linked to US factories on the other side of the border – as we have recently seen. Our lumber industry here has been hit very hard indeed by the declne in US housing starts and the falling value of the greenback is causing us all kinds of heartburn – not least in tourism.

Yet we think that they are going to let us take a bigger slice of their port business? I don’t think so, Tim.

Richmond News

Published: Thursday, January 31, 2008The City of Richmond and Vancouver Coastal Health officials are warning Richmond residents that water main upgrades could cause some cloudiness in their tap water, though the discolouration poses little risk to healthy individuals.

A city news release said Metro Vancouver staffers are conducting work near the Oak Street Bridge as part of seismic upgrades.

Vancouver Coastal Health spokesperson Viviana Zanocco said health unit officials are monitoring the water, and that the turbidity is a result of a change in the water’s flow. The water used to flow from Vancouver to Richmond and through to Delta, it is now running from Delta back to Richmond.

I am reproducing this announcement entire as a public service to my fellow residents of Richmond. Who have probably all installed filtration systems of one kind or another on their drinking water anyway. In addition to the turbidity mentioned above, these systems are generally considered essential since they also remove the strange swimming pool smell of chlorine, the “tea leaf scale” – a sort of light brown fleck – that we get from the inside of our water mains – and – for some people who are really worried about their health – the parasites and other nasties that seem to get through every so often.

The people who do not have these systems buy their water already filtered and bottled. At great expense. For some reason they do not take any comfort from the announcements of the authorities. While they bitch and complain about bus fares and gasoline at over $1 a litre they seem to be willing to pay more than that for water they feel safe with. I wonder why. Perhaps it is because the stuff that comes out of the taps does not look clean – even when no work is being done. There are also people who put filters on their showerheads, and say it makes them feel better.

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Who am I and what is this

I am a transportation economist and regional planner, displaced from England by the abolition of the Greater London Council and a dislike of Thatcherism. Until March of 2004 I worked for the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority on wide variety of policy issues. None of these have been solved since I left, and the region has abandoned its long established growth strategy altogether, as the province expanded its major highways and is now proposing another new bridge over the Fraser. I have long advocated more sensible policies to better integrate transport and land use. And this blog is a way to keep up the pressure! It also allows me to vent a bit on related issues.